97 pages • 3 hours read
Farah Ahmedi, Tamim AnsaryThe Other Side of the Sky
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Where We Came From”
The second chapter gives the reader a concise overview of Ahmedi’s family background in Afghanistan. Her family roots go back to a small village 92 miles southwest of Kabul. Her people were farmers and raised animals. Her immediate family genealogy begins with her father’s father who was a mullah, a learned man who read the Koran and was a faith leader in the community. Although Ahmedi’s grandfather garnered him respect from the community, his responsibilities as a mullah prevented him from farming his land properly. As a result, the land became neglected and did not produce the yield that he needed to support his growing family. He had to borrow large sums of money, and on one of these occasions, he pawned his lands as collateral. Now a landless peasant, Ahmedi’s grandfather became quite poor.
When Ahmedi’s father, Ghulam Hussein, came of age, he decided to do something to get the family lands back. Hussein went to Kabul and apprenticed himself to a master tailor, learned the trade, worked very hard, and, after several years, earned enough money to return to the village. He paid off his father’s debts and got the family lands back.
Hussein returned to Kabul and became a successful tailor in his own right. When he was ready to marry, his mother (Ahmedi’s grandmother) found him a suitable bride. Not long after her parents were married, however, tensions came to a head between her father and the leader of the village. Her father moved the extended family to Kabul. The family move coincided with major changes unfolding for Afghanistan as a country. Kabul was becoming more modern, and soon after Ahmedi’s parents arrived, the Soviet Union occupied the city, an Afghan Communist party overthrew the longstanding aristocracy, and then by the end of 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The USSR never had complete control over the country, however, with rebels called mujahideen organizing the rural people against Soviet rule. The Soviet fight against the mujahideen meant massive aerial bombardment of rural villages, forcing millions from their homes. Many fled to neighboring Iran or Pakistan, while many more came to Kabul, which was the only place safe from Soviet air attacks since that was where the Soviets themselves were based.
For Ahmedi’s family, Soviet occupation and the war with the mujahideen meant that her father’s siblings came to stay with him in Kabul. Her father supported his brothers and sisters, found wives and husbands for each of them, and continued to house their growing families until space became too cramped, and he told his siblings that they needed to move out. This caused tension and fault lines to emerge within the larger clan. More immediately, Ahmedi’s mother was having difficulty getting pregnant, which caused great stress for her. But eventually, Ahmedi’s brothers and sister were born, and in 1987, Ahmedi herself was born.
Chapter 3 Summary: “When I Was Very Little”
Although her entire childhood occurred within the context of the war between the mujahideen and the Soviets, Ahmedi recalls her early childhood as happy. The gunfire and rocket explosions were off in the distance, or in other parts of the city, and the occasional warplanes streaking overhead were a delight to the children for the enchanting patterns that their white smoke made against the blue sky. Ahmedi notes that she did not really live in Kabul because she hardly ever left the family compound. As a result, she did not really get to know Kabul much at all. Her father’s tailor business had grown into a large garment enterprise. He received shipments of used clothing from abroad (mostly Germany) and sold the garments that were still in good condition, or he repurposed the fabrics and materials, creating new garments.
Ahmedi recounts how the entire family contributed to this process. When a shipment arrived, the kids played in the mountains of fabric, rifling through the pockets looking for items left behind, odd little treasures. Then all of the children were assigned a number of garments and, equipped with a razor blade or scissors, they took them apart, removing buttons, hooks, zippers, labels, and other accessories. Once they finished this chore, the younger kids went outside to play while the older children helped to iron the fabric. Ahmedi also recalls her mischievous moments, such as dropping food on the ground and then serving it to the family as if nothing happened, stealing a cookie, and inadvertently drowning her older brother’s baby chicks.
Chapters 2-3 Analysis
The family history overview in “Where We Came From” alludes to the rich history of the Afghan people and of the region that would become the modern nation-state of Afghanistan. She notes that a thousand years ago, her ancestral village, Ghazni, “was the capital of an empire that stretched from the Indus River to the Caspian Sea” (13). Built by artists, scholars, and engineers, it had paved streets and magnificent buildings. Today, Ghazni is a small walled city. A ruined tower and fragments of ancient walls are all that remain of its glorious history. There is a world of history compressed into Ahmedi’s summary, but it connects directly to the main events of her young life. At one time, what the West now refers to as the Middle East was a major epicenter of world civilization. Its cultural, political, and economic sophistication rivaled the leading empires of eastern Asia and Africa at a time when what is now known as Europe was merely a backward colonized peninsula of the Asiatic continent. The transformation of global culture across the ensuing centuries, such that Afghanistan is now a place from whence refugees flee to the wealthy and technologically advanced Western societies, has everything to do with war-making.
Ahmedi narrates this geopolitical context, however, through a child’s eyes—albeit one wise beyond her years. For instance, she charts her family expansion, her birth and those of her siblings, through the steady escalation of war, beginning with the Soviet invasion, their eventual departure, and culminating with the Taliban’s triumph. Also, Ahmedi notes that her father’s recycled garment business would lead to her mother’s asthma: the family burned the unusable scraps, unaware that much of the fabric was synthetic and the burning plastic released toxins into the family’s home.
Ahmedi also uses these early chapters of her childhood to convey formative character experiences. Chapter three, for example, culminates with Ahmedi’s story of stealing a cookie that was meant only for house guests. She relishes the first bite, but then is overcome by guilt and cannot finish eating it. She is fearful of getting caught if she puts the cookie back, so she hides it under a mattress. Later, her mother tells her and her siblings a parable of a young boy who steals and gets away with it, until later in life he commits a serious offense punishable by death. Thinking of her unpunished theft of the cookie, Ahmedi is horrified and promises herself never to lie or cheat or steal again. Meanwhile, she writes, in the larger world of war, her people were being slaughtered for no reason, and perhaps “at that very moment someone was planting the land mine that would soon plunge my small life into horror” (34).
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